Category: Writing

Here’s designer Julia Lloyd’s genius cover for The Breach, published March 17th 2020. It captures so much of the book in one strange, haunting image, and I bloody love it. As this novel has at least one hand reaching for horror, the official reveal was over at Ginger Nuts of Horror, where there’s also a…

The Breach, or the novel that very nearly did me in, is structurally edited and back for copy edits at Titan. It’ll be out in March 2020, and a cover design will follow soon. I’m beavering away on the next thing, working title Mothertown. It’s a maddening experience, and I’m enjoying it. That’s masochism for…

Zero Bomb is published today by the lovely crew at Titan Books, and is now available in all your favourite places. It’s a book I didn’t quite see coming: I started writing it in January 2017 and finished the first draft late that summer – pretty fast by my usual standards. But the real writing…

Massively excited to write that Titan Books have acquired my next two novels for UK/US publication in 2019 and 2020. Zero Bomb (March 2019) is a paranoid near-future SF mystery set between London, Birmingham and the fringes of Manchester. It concerns ‘news trauma’, neo-Luddite terrorism, crap parenting, ‘70s British SF and a very strange fox.…

2017. A small country, seized by nostalgia for a country that never actually existed to start with, begins to implode… My writing year peaked early with my trip to Seattle for Norwescon 40 and the Philip K. Dick Awards ceremony. Fittingly, science fiction conventions always have something of the slipstream about them. As Claudia Casper…

This Easter I’m jetting out to Seattle for Norwescon 40 and the 2017 Philip K Dick Award ceremony. I’m looking forward to meeting the other nominees, to exploring the city, and to catching up with the Angry Robot crew across the pond. This will be my first US convention, and while I have some expectations (world-class cosplay, people asking me to repeat…

Today was going to be an odd day for plenty of reasons. This morning’s news that Graft is nominated for the 2017 Philip K. Dick Award has made it all the weirder. To say this means a lot is a ridiculous understatement. Dick’s work (particularly his short stories) has been hugely influential on my stuff, so to have my…

I realise after the fact that I’ve been hibernating for a while. As I threatened during my chat with the wonderful Anne Charnock at Mancunicon last March, we left that London and returned to the north at the end of May, and have now moved into a little house on the edge of the Peak…

Last Friday I was lucky enough to catch a preview of artist Yu-Chen Wang’s new work for The Imitation Game at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry and Manchester Art Gallery. I’ve already waffled on about my involvement with the project – but even after a good few weeks writing and editing fiction with Yu-Chen and museum curator Sarah Baines, it…

After a mild print hiccup delayed the UK print run, Graft is now officially launched in all Angry Robot territories. I think I’m allowed to breathe again. Ebook, US, UK. And a nice rug. Not pictured: an estranged audiobook. As part of our publicity assault drive, I had a short essay published on SF Signal that delves into…